Morality can hardly perform a function, which is discussed in this chapter, unless it offers directives that not only can but frequently do differ from those of self-interest itself. The idea of potential congruence asserts that the relation between morality and the interests of the individual agent is characterized by a high degree of mutual accommodation, so that the frequency and severity of conflict between these two perspectives is significantly reduced. Conflicts are nevertheless possible in principle, but the extent to (...) which they arise in practice is not fixed or immutable. Instead, the frequency of conflict depends to a considerable degree on the character of the prevailing social and political institutions. Achieving convergence between morality and self-interest is in part a social and political task. The account of the “priority” of morality developed by Thomas Scanlon in his book What We Owe to Each Other is similar in a number of respects to this chapter's account of potential congruence. (shrink)

In this anthology, distinguished scholars--Thomas Nagel, T.M. Scanlon, John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Samuela Scheffler, Conrad D. Johnson, Bernard Williams, Peter Railton, Amartya Sen, Philippa Foot, and Derek Parfit-- debate arguments for and against the moral doctrine of consequentialism to present a complete view of this important topic in moral philosophy.

This book collects Thomas Nagel's recent philosophical reflections on topics of fundamental interest: ethics, moral psychology, science and religion, death and the holocaust, and the metaphysics of mind. Among the figures discussed are Peter Singer, Alvin Plantinga, Christine Korsgaard, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch, T. M. Scanlon, Ronald Dworkin, Samuel Scheffler, Daniel Kahneman, Jonathan Haidt, Joshua Greene, and Daniel Dennett. Nagel consistently defends a realist interpretation of moral truth and resists reductive attempts to subsume ethics to psychology (...) and evolutionary theory. He also defends a pluralistic conception of the content of morality against utilitarianism, including deontological elements such as rights and special responsibilities. A realist outlook also informs his discussions of metaphysical and epistemological questions. The book closes with tributes to a number of people Nagel has known over the course of his career. The essays are all addressed to a general audience, and should appeal not only to philosophers but to anyone interested in current attempts to understand human life, human values, and how we fit into the world. (shrink)

In Chapter 4 of Science and Subjectivity, I offered several arguments critical of Professor Thomas Kuhn's views as expressed in his influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. His recent replies to these criticisms seem to me so inadequate as to suggest that he, and therefore others as well, may have failed to grasp their full import. Accordingly, I shall, in the first part of this paper, briefly recapitulate my earlier arguments and offer a short rejoinder to Professor Kuhn's (...) replies. The second part of the paper will expand upon my earlier discussion to consider the basic metaphors of vision and revolution, offered by Kuhn to replace the traditional notion of deliberation. My argument here will be that these new metaphors are incongruous in critical respects, and my discussion will conclude by considering their relations to the contrast between understanding and accepting a theory. (shrink)

This paper resolves the problems raised by Israel Scheffler and Noam Chomsky against Quine’s criterion of ontological commitment. I call Scheffler’s and Chomsky’s problems as (1) the problem of inexorable ontological commitments and (2) the problem of false existential inferences. I extend their problems to a third one, which is called as the problem of extended inexorable ontological commitments to rival entities. In order to present the third problem, two ontological disputes are considered: Russell–Meinong dispute from the context (...) of the referential theory of meaning and David Lewis–Meinong dispute from the context of modal metaphysics. In order to work out a resolution to these three problems, I emphasize the distinction between meta-ontology/meta-theory and object theory. Then, it is explained that there is a functional difference between Quine’s criterion of ontological commitments (meta-theory) and the object theories to which this criterion is applied. Here, considering the functional difference, I introduce different kinds of commitments: direct commitments and indirect commitments. Using Strawson’s views on the notion of presupposition, the distinction between direct commitments and indirect commitments is characterized further. Employing this distinction, I resolve the problem of inexorable ontological commitment to the entities, the problem of false existential inferences and the problems of extended inexorable ontological commitment to the rival entities. (shrink)

This paper interprets Bernard Williams's claim that all practical reasons must meet the internal reasons constraint. It is argued that this constraint is independent of any substantive Humean claims about reasons and its rationale is a content scepticism about the capacity of pure reason to supply reasons for action. The final sections attempt a positive reconciliation of the internal reasons account with the motivation for external reasons, namely, securing practical objecitivy in the form of a commitment to impartiality. Impartiality is (...) given a contractualist interpretation in the limited sense that socialised agents have a central disposition to hold those reasons that are defensible to reasonable interlocutors, but this is not a substantive constraint on their content. Such a commitment plays a structural role in motivation illustrated by the analogy of the internalisation of a relativised a priori principle. Theorists of moral motivation such as Nagel and Scheffler have uncovered the importance of such structural motivations, but they are best treated as an architectonic feature of a socialised agent's motivational set, not as a principle or motive akin to other principles or motives within that set. This gives us critical leverage on the motivational sets of individuals that goes beyond launching "optimistic internal reasons" statements at them, but it does not violate Williams's constraints on the idea of a practical reason in general. (shrink)

In his valuable book [3], Israel Scheffler presents an extended critique of Thomas Kuhn's philosophy of science. Scheffler argues against Kuhn's “main thesis,” namely that “... paradigm change in science is not generally subject to deliberation and critical assessment”. Scheffler does recognize, though, that there are important elements of Kuhn's view that themselves seem to conflict with this “main thesis.” For these elements seem to make possible deliberation, critical assessment, and objectivity in the discussion of scientific (...) paradigms. So it appears from Scheffler's critique that Kuhn's position is inconsistent. The puzzle is compounded by Kuhn's admission—indeed, insistence—that his book does contain “a preliminary codification of good reasons for theory choice. These are... reasons of exactly the kind standard in philosophy of science: accuracy, scope, simplicity, fruitfulness, and the like”. In his recent reply to Kuhn, Scheffler quotes this passage from Kuhn and says: “If these reasons are not... to be construed as utterly free of all constraints or themselves paradigm-dependent, then they allow the comparison of rival paradigms and make paradigm debates intelligible. Such intelligibility is, however, at odds with Kuhn's statement that the proponents of competing paradigms ‘will inevitably talk through each other’”. In this interchange between Scheffler and Kuhn, one gets the impression of people, if not paradigms, talking “through each other.” I think that this nonmeeting of minds is due to interpreting Kuhn as an opponent of objectivity when in fact he is not an opponent but a proponent. It is this misinterpretation which produces the apparent inconsistency in Kuhn's position. In this paper I suggest a way of understanding Kuhn which resolves this apparent inconsistency in his work and might help to focus discussion on the real issue between Kuhn and many of his critics. This suggestion has the crucial consequence of shifting the focus from objectivity to the real issue, namely truth. (shrink)

In this book, T. M. Scanlon offers new answers to these questions, as they apply to the central part of morality that concerns what we owe to each other.

This volume brings together for the first time a significant number of Reid's manuscript papers on natural history, physiology and materialist metaphysics. An important contribution not only to Reid studies but also to our understanding of eighteenth-century science and its context.

In the 1920s, scientists at the University of Cambridge’s Sir William Dunn Institute of Biochemistry made major contributions to the emerging discipline of biochemistry while also devoting considerable time and energy to the production of a humor journal entitled Brighter Biochemistry. Although humor is frequently regarded as peripheral to the work of science, the journal provides an opportunity to understand how it contributes to the social infrastructure of scientific communities as modern workplaces. Taking methodological cues from cultural history, ethnography, and (...) humor studies, this essay conducts a close and contextual reading of Brighter Biochemistry. This reading demonstrates how humor served as a central means through which members of the Dunn confronted workplace issues, including creating cooperative work teams, responding to gender discrimination, addressing funding anxiety, and defining professional identity. These conclusions provide a new perspective on the well-documented history of the Dunn and also offer a model for how historians of science can approach humor when its traces are encountered in other settings. (shrink)

v. 1. Editorial introduction -- v. 2. The English and Latin texts (i) -- v. 3. The English and Latin texts (ii).

Thomas Reid was a philosopher who founded the Scottish school of 'common sense'. Much of Reid's work is a critique of his contemporary, David Hume, whose empiricism he rejects. In this work, written after Reid's appointment to a professorship at the university of Glasgow, and published in 1785, he turns his attention to ideas about perception, memory, conception, abstraction, judgement, reasoning and taste. He examines the work of his predecessors and contemporaries, arguing that 'when we find philosophers maintaining that (...) there is no heat in the fire, nor colour in the rainbow … we may be apt to think the whole to be only a dream of fanciful men, who have entangled themselves in cobwebs spun out of their own brain'. Written by one of the Scottish Enlightenment's most important thinkers, this work brings to life the intellectual debates of the time. (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas produced a voluminous body of work on moral theory, and much of that work is on virtue, particularly the status and value of the virtues as principles of virtuous acts, and the way in which a moral life can be organized around them schematically. Thomas Osborne presents Aquinas's account of virtue in its historical, philosophical and theological contexts, to show the reader what Aquinas himself wished to teach about virtue. His discussion makes the complexities of Aquinas's (...) moral thought accessible to readers despite the differences between Thomas's texts themselves, and the distance between our background assumptions and his. The book will be valuable for scholars and students in ethics, medieval philosophy, and theology. (shrink)

This paper presents a micro-history of an object in the collection of the Whipple Museum of the History of Science, with an emphasis on how Wh.3469 reflects a hybrid of two different interwar British X-ray crystallographic communities, namely those based in WL Bragg’s physics laboratory at the Victoria University of Manchester and the Crystallographic Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. It explores connections between Wh.3469’s final design and construction and the different interests each community had in X-ray crystallography.Keywords: Powder camera; (...) British X-ray crystallography; Object history. (shrink)

There has been an explosion of interest in the metaphysics of fundamentality in recent decades. The consensus view, called metaphysical foundationalism, maintains that there is something absolutely fundamental in reality upon which everything else depends. However, a number of thinkers have chal- lenged the arguments in favor of foundationalism and have proposed competing non-foundationalist ontologies. This paper provides a systematic and critical introduction to metaphysical foundationalism in the current literature and argues that its relation to ontological dependence and substance should (...) be qualified in important ways. (shrink)

In a recent paper Weinberg (2007) claims that there is an essential mark of trustworthiness which typical sources of evidence as perception or memory have, but philosophical intuitions lack, namely that we are able to detect and correct errors produced by these “hopeful” sources. In my paper I will argue that being a hopeful source isn't necessary for providing us with evidence. I then will show that, given some plausible background assumptions, intuitions at least come close to being hopeful, if (...) they are reliable. If this is true, Weinberg's new challenge comes down to the claim that philosophical intuitions are not reliable since they are significantly unstable. In the second part of my paper I will argue that and why the experimentally established instability of folk intuitions about philosophical cases does not show that philosopher's expert intuitions about these cases are instable. (shrink)

Feeling good: four ways -- Finding that feeling -- The place of pleasure -- Knowing what's what -- Making things happen -- Being good -- Love and friendship -- Putting it together.

Looking back on it, it seems almost incredible that so many equally educated, equally sincere compatriots and contemporaries, all drawing from the same limited stock of evidence, should have reached so many totally different conclusions---and always with complete certainty.

We normally take it for granted that other people will live on after we ourselves have died. Even if we do not believe in a personal afterlife in which we survive our own deaths, we assume that there will be a "collective afterlife" in which humanity survives long after we are gone. Samuel Scheffler maintains that this assumption plays a surprising - indeed astonishing - role in our lives.

I critically examine some deflationary theories of properties, according to which properties are ‘shadows of predicates’ and quantification over them serves a mere quasi-logical function. I start by considering Hofweber’s internalist theory, and pose a problem for his account of inexpressible properties. I then introduce a theory of properties that closely resembles Horwich’s minimalist theory of truth. This theory overcomes the problem of inexpressible properties, but its formulation presupposes the existence of various kinds of abstract objects. I discuss some ways (...) to reduce these existence assumptions, but ultimately suggest that deflationists can hardly avoid quantification over abstract objects of one sort or another. I conclude that property deflationism is perhaps not as deflationary as some philosophers want it to be, but that it’s still apt to call the position ‘deflationary’. (shrink)

What are the truth conditions of want ascriptions? According to an influential approach, they are intimately connected to the agent’s beliefs: ⌜S wants p⌝ is true iff, within S’s belief set, S prefers the p worlds to the not-p worlds. This approach faces a well-known problem, however: it makes the wrong predictions for what we call (counter)factual want ascriptions, wherein the agent either believes p or believes not-p—for example, ‘I want it to rain tomorrow and that is exactly what is (...) going to happen’ or ‘I want this weekend to last forever, but of course it will end in a few hours’. We solve this problem. The truth conditions for want ascriptions are, we propose, connected to the agent’s conditional beliefs. We substantiate this connection by pursuing a striking parallel between (counter)factual and non-(counter)factual want ascriptions on the one hand and counterfactual and indicative conditionals on the other. (shrink)

Issues concerning patients' rights are at the center of bioethics, but the political basis for these rights has rarely been examined. In Bioethics in a Liberal Society: The Political Framework of Bioethics Decision Making , Thomas May offers a compelling analysis of how the political context of liberal constitutional democracy shapes the rights and obligations of both patients and health care professionals. May focuses on how a key feature of liberal society -- namely, an individual's right to make independent (...) decisions -- has an impact on the most important relational facets of health care, such as patients' autonomy and professionals' rights of conscience. Although a liberal political framework protects individual judgments, May asserts that this right is based on the assumption of an individual's competency to make sound decisions. May uses case studies to examine society's approach to medical decision making when, for reasons ranging from age to severe mental disorder, a person lacks sufficient competency to make independent and fully informed choices. To protect the autonomy of these vulnerable patients, May emphasizes the need for health care ethics committees and ethics consultants to help guide the decision-making process in clinical settings. Bioethics in a Liberal Society is essential reading for all those interested in understanding how bioethics is practiced within our society. (shrink)

The Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid first published Essays on Active Powers of Man in 1788 while he was Professor of Philosophy at King's College, Aberdeen. The work contains a set of essays on active power, the will, principles of action, the liberty of moral agents, and morals. Reid was a key figure in the Scottish Enlightenment and one of the founders of the 'common sense' school of philosophy. In Active Powers Reid gives his fullest exploration of sensus communis as (...) the basis of all philosophical inquiry. He uses common sense realism to argue for the existence of a stable external world, the existence of other minds, and to offer a powerful challenge to versions of the Theory of Ideas advocated by Hume and Locke . This is a key work of the Scottish Enlightenment that made important contributions to fundamental debates about the basis of philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

Tracking the development of Foucault's key concepts Lemke offers the most comprehensive and systematic account of Michel Foucault's work on power and government from 1970 until his death in 1984. He convincingly argues, using material that has only partly been translated into English, that Foucault's concern with ethics and forms of subjectivation is always already integrated into his political concerns and his analytics of power. The book also shows how the concept of government was taken up in different lines of (...) research in France before it gave rise to "governmentality studies" in the Anglophone world. A Critique of Political Reason provides a clear and well-structured exposition that is theoretically challenging but also accessible for a wider audience. Thus, the book can beread both as an original examination of Foucault's concept of government and as a general introduction to his "genealogy of power". (shrink)

T. H. Green's Prolegomena to Ethics is a classic of modern philosophy. It begins with Green's idealist attack on empiricist metaphysics and epistemology and develops a perfectionist ethical theory that aims to bring together the best elements in the ancient and modern traditions, and that provides the moral foundations for Green's own distinctive brand of liberalism. David Brink's new edition will restore this great work to prominence, after two decades in which it has been hard to obtain. The present edition (...) uses the text of the fifth edition, accompanied by a new introductory essay, bibliographical essay, and index. Translations are provided for Green's quotations from other languages. Of particular importance is the editor's extended introductory essay, which situates the Prolegomena in its intellectual context, sympathetically but critically engages its main themes, and explains Green's enduring significance for the history of philosophy and contemporary ethical theory. Students and scholars of the history of ethics, ethical theory, political philosophy, and nineteenth century philosophy will find this new edition an invaluable resource. (shrink)

Suppose that one is at least a minimal realist about a given domain, in that one thinks that that domain contains truths that are not in any interesting sense of our own making. Given such an understanding, what can be said for and against the method of reflective equilibrium as a procedure for investigating the domain? One fact that lends this question some interest is that many philosophers do combine commitments to minimal realism and a reflective equilibrium methodology. Here, for (...) example, is David Lewis on philosophy: Our “intuitions” are simply opinions: our philosophical theories are the same. Some are commonsensical, some are sophisticated; some are particular; some general; some are more firmly held, some less. But they are all opinions, and a reasonable goal for a philosopher is to bring them into equilibrium. Our common task it to find out what equilibria there are that can withstand examination, but it remains for each of us to come to rest at one or another of them… Once the menu of well-worked out theories is before us, philosophy is a matter of opinion. Is that to say that there is no truth to be had? Or that the truth is of our own making, and different ones of us can make it differently? Not at all! If you say flatly that there is no god, and I say that there are countless gods but none of them are our worldmates, then it may be that neither of us is making any mistake of method. We may each be bringing our opinions to equilibrium in the most careful possible way, taking account of all the arguments, distinctions, and counterexamples. But one of us, at least, is making a mistake of fact. Which one is wrong depends on what there is (1983: x-xi). In addition to philosophy in general, the method of reflective equilibrium has also been endorsed as the appropriate procedure for investigating various other subject.. (shrink)

This paper presents a new approach to the class-theoretic paradoxes. In the first part of the paper, I will distinguish classes from sets, describe the function of class talk, and present several reasons for postulating type-free classes. This involves applications to the problem of unrestricted quantification, reduction of properties, natural language semantics, and the epistemology of mathematics. In the second part of the paper, I will present some axioms for type-free classes. My approach is loosely based on the Gödel–Russell idea (...) of limited ranges of significance. It is shown how to derive the second-order Dedekind–Peano axioms within that theory. I conclude by discussing whether the theory can be used as a solution to the problem of unrestricted quantification. In an appendix, I prove the consistency of the class theory relative to Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory. (shrink)

This book is a collection of eleven essays by one of the most interesting moral philosophers currently writing. It examines challenges to liberal thought posed by the changing circumstances of the modern world such as the conflicting tendencies toward global integration, and greater ethnic and communal identification. The author considers whether liberal principles of justice can accommodate social and global interdependencies while reaffirming the importance of individual responsibility and acknowledging the significance of people's diverse personal and communal allegiances.

Spectres of False Divinity presents a historical and critical interpretation of Hume's rejection of the existence of a deity with moral attributes. In Hume's view, no first cause or designer responsible for the ordered universe could possibly have moral attributes; nor could the existence of such a being have any real implications for human practice or conduct. Hume's case for this 'moral atheism' is a central plank of both his naturalistic agenda in metaphysics and his secularizing program in moral theory. (...) It complements his wider critique of traditional theism, and threatens to rule out any religion that would make claims on moral practice. Thomas Holden situates Hume's commitment to moral atheism in its historical and philosophical context, offers a systematic interpretation of his case for divine amorality, and shows how Hume can endorse moral atheism while maintaining his skeptical attitude toward traditional forms of cosmological and theological speculation. (shrink)

With Jan Degenaar and Kevin O’Regan’s (D&O) critique of (what they call) ‘autopoietic enactivism’ as point of departure, this article seeks to revisit, refine, and develop phenomenology’s significance for the enactive view. Arguing that D&O’s ‘sensorimotor theory’ fails to do justice to perceptual meaning, the article unfolds by (1) connecting this meaning to the notion of enaction as a meaningful co-definition of perceiver and perceived, (2) recounting phenomenological reasons for conceiving of the perceiving subject as a living body, and (3) (...) showing how the phenomenological perspective does a better job at fulfilling D&O’s requirement for grounding notions of mentality in ‘outer’ criteria than they do. The picture that thus emerges is one of perceptual meaning as an integration of lived, living, and behavioral aspects – a structure of behavior that cannot be captured by appeal to sensorimotor capacities alone but that is adequately illuminated by the enactive notion of adaptive autonomy. (shrink)